All My Favorite Singers Couldn't Sing

One of the most endearing things about listening to children perform is that they mistake pitch for volume, often singing louder when the music calls for them to sing higher. Typically, we forgive their mistakes because they are children, and they may not know any better.

We tend expect better from adults, however.

Looking through my music collection, you'll find many artists with undisputed vocal talent: Elvis Costello, Thom Yorke, Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, Richard Buckner, Andrew Bird. And while these are some of my favorites, there is a whole other class of singers who do not possess any of the typical vocal chops.

Now, I have a genuine affection for the Outsider Music of Jandek, The Shaggs, and Wesley Willis, but that said, the pleasure I derive from their music is somewhat precious, and something like the affection we feel for those groups of 5-year-olds performing their class musicals for a cafetorium of teary-eyed parents.

The artists I'm writing about today, however, do not fall in the "outsider" category. David Berman of the Silver Jews, one of these wonderfully off-key singers, put it perfectly in the lyric which titles this entry. His voice wanders well off the melodic path, yet to me, these diversions only strengthen the power of the performance. There is something about his seeming lack of concern with the melody of the song that underscores the depth of his poetic lyrics and, paradoxically, emphasize his own sense of melody. The first Silver Jews song I ever heard was "Random Rules," the first track of American Water, which I bought based on a rave review from Pitchfork. The opening stanza immediately captured my attention, and this was precisely the result of the haphazard, far-from-perfect vocal delivery.

In Nineteen Eighty Four,
I was hospitalized for approaching perfection
Slowly screwing my way across Europe
They had to make a correction

The simple fact that the delivery is so sloppy prompted me to listen to what Berman was saying. And while his lyrics are frequently nonsensical, they always evoke in me a powerful sense of place and mood.

Unlike outsider artist Jandek (who if nothing else, does evoke a tangible mood in his music), Berman actually does possess a strong sense of melody, and "Random Rules" is a perfect example of a tune that will stay with you. Even so, nobody could ever cover this song. It's the imperfections that take a nice low-key song and push it towards greatness.

Berman's partner in crime, Stephen Malkmus, employs perhaps a more affected, but similarly evocative set of vocal tics. The first time I heard Pavement's "Range Life," my reaction was something along the lines of "What the hell is this?!" Certainly this singer had a studio, with engineers who could clean up these vocals. What exactly was he thinking by not at least laying some effects or three light background singers to clean up the strained warble of that chorus?

And even while I was puzzled, I didn't completely turn away.

Pavement's wildly off-key vocals stand in stark contrast against the musical inventiveness (I'm loath to throw around the term "genius") on display throughout their discography. With Pavement, the vocals have turned out to be the beauty mark that help to underscore the virtuosity within their music. While Pavement presents themselves as post-modern and ironic (lyrically and vocally), their music demonstrates the band's true talent and depth of effort. The off-key vocals serve to accent the winding, noodling melodies, and it's hard to imagine a better combination of form and expression.

It is surprising to me how much the Flaming Lips have crossed over into the mainstream, considering the first time I heard Wayne Coyne's tortured warble, I felt noticeably uneasy. As with Pavement, it took me a second and third listen to appreciate the evocative quality of Coyne's over-reaching high notes. You can tell by listening to the 'Lips that Wayne is probably singing an octave above his natural register, but something in the strained delivery fits quite nicely with the band's populist psychedelia.

Perhaps Coyne's most moving vocal take is on the song "Waiting for a Superman," where he sings very plainly about the everyday struggles of existence. The song is a beautiful centerpiece to a masterpiece of an album. Coyne's voice nearly cracks as he sings:

Tell everyone waiting for Superman
That they should hold on as best they can
He hasn't dropped them, forgot them, or anything

It's just too heavy for Superman to lift

It is precisely the cracking voice and strained vocals that propel the song beyond simply a pretty song and into something transcendent. I'm a big fan of Iron & Wine, and I know they covered this song, but I cannot imagine that their version could outshine the original.

Why is it, to paraphrase David Berman, that all my favorite singers cannot sing?

In all three cases,--Silver Jews, Pavement, and The Flaming Lips,--the "non-traditional" (ie: horribly off-key) vocals serve to underscore something elemental about the band. Berman's atonal meandering calls attention to his poetic gifts, while Pavement's "slacker" vocals mesh comfortably with the expert noodling of their guitars, and Coyne's strained, yearning falsetto pushes ever further towards the heavens.

We can't all be Thom Yorke, but as these artists show, we don't all have to be.

Still here

Still here, though shamed from not posting. I realized after I started this thing that Nick Hornby pretty much did exactly what I wanted to do when he wrote "Songbook." That kind of put a kink in my plans.

That said, I will return to blogging about my favorite music and other topics soon, and I'll try to do better than the last post, which was pretty poor in my estimation.

So the score now is Metablogs:3, Actual Blogs, 2.

Heh.

Coolness and the Inner Geek

I spent my high school years trying on many new personas. I grew the hair to embarrassingly mulletacious lengths, went through the torn jeans, Converse all-stars, Members Only, all-denim-all-the-time phases.

At some point, I became a nonconformist. And by that, I mean that I did all the sorts of things those nonconformists^TM are supposed to do. I drew Anarchy symbols on everything, moved from Ozzy to Metallica to the Dead Kennedys to Minor Threat to DRI, etc. I started a band with my friends, and we wrote earnest, angry, endearingly juvenile screeds against the evils of conformity.

Of course, I did it all because I thought it was cool. I don't think I was hiding anything from anybody except for myself. I was still a big geek.

When I think back on it now, I realize that the coolest guy I ever knew had nothing to do with any of that shit. He was a friend of my brother's, and his favorite artist was Weird Al Yankovic. Fuck you if you didn't like it. The thing about this guy is that he was comfortable with who he was. It didn't matter a bit if you didn't like what he liked, because he just didn't care.

The greatest character in my favorite TV series of all time is Bill Haverchuck, from Freaks and Geeks. Bill reminds me so much of this kid. He has the protypical "geek" persona. He watches Dallas and doesn't much care if you like it. For me, the pivotal scene of Bill's character development comes when he "wins" a game of "spin the bottle" and gets "seven minutes of Heaven" with a popular girl. They spend their first 5 minutes in the "heaven" of the closet with her telling Bill how there is no way in hell she's going to kiss him. Bill's response is almost heroic. Why on earth would she assume that he wants anything to do with her?

Oh, if only. Not only the spin the bottle thing--If only I could have had that kind of self-awareness and self-confidence.

At some point after High School, I learned to embrace my inner geek. I traded the trappings of pseudo-anarchist pretentiousness for a newfound devotion to They Might Be Giants. Like Bill Haverchuck and like my brother's friend, John and John embody this "geek cool" sense of doing things that they enjoy without worrying themselves all that much with appearances.

Whether it's the punning of "The World's Address," the insane ramblings of "Where Your Eyes Don't Go," or the edu-folk and science-pop of "James K. Polk" and "Why Does the Sun Shine?", there is something just liberating about the way the Johns celebrate all those things that I tried to repress throughout my youth.

Only two artists have more tracks on my IPod than TMBG, and those are Elvis Costello and the Beatles. When prompted a while back to list my "most listened to" album over my lifetime, I couldn't lie and say something cool like Nick Drake or Pavement. It was Lincoln.

Finally, in adulthood, I can be the unrepentant geek I always wanted to be. Fuck you if you don't like it. Spin up your favorite guilty pleasure and just be who the hell you are.

Formed a Blog, I Formed a Blog!

OK, so I've got my first "content" blog in place, so why not blog about it, just to be appropriately self-absorbed? :wank-1:

My strongest memories are almost always triggered by music: I hear a song and it brings me back to a time. The feelings come back to me even before the stories.

I want to remember the stories.

I want to write about my experiences with the art that I love.

Maybe it's pathetic, but most of my life seems in some way to have been interwoven with pop culture. That's what I'm really exploring here.

Should you find this blog and wish to comment, I'd be happy to open it to other people's content--your experiences with music, movies, books, television. Everybody hears things differently, and I like hearing what you have to say about your experience of the works of art that I'm writing about.

I won't always write serious stuff, and it won't always be about music. I will try to minimize the meta-blogging and focus on the content.

I don't plan on being terribly linear in any of this, nor do I expect anybody to get much out of it.

And God help me if this becomes one of those "Clipped my toenails today and played two hours of elf bowling" blogs. If it ever comes to that, do us both a favor and punch me in the face.

In all those long days of June...

"How long have you lived around here?" asks the man on the other side of the table. "Do you know your way around town?"

It's the summer of 1990, and I've returned home from my freshman year at college. I've responded to a classified ad, and am interviewing for a yet-to-be-determined position.

"I've lived here about 8 years, and I know my way around."

"Thank you. We'll be in touch."

I still do not know what this interview is all about. All I know is that I have to get a job for the summer or my parents will be pissed.

I have more important things on my mind, anyway. How the hell am I going to make it through the summer without my girlfriend?

She was my first serious girlfriend, and we had been inseparable throughout my freshman year. I was a hormone-crazed, possessive, insecure geek who had no idea how to maintain a relationship and no clue how I was going to make it three months without seeing her.

As with everything in my life, music brought it all together. The soundtrack for that summer was Camper Van Beethoven's Key Lime Pie, borrowed from a friend and later purchased.

I have been a metalhead, a punk, a folkie, and a hipster, with countless stops and layovers along the way. This summer, the summer of 1990, started with Camper van Beethoven.

During this same summer, I spent a lot of time with my best friend. He had left college to get married. It was doomed relationship, and I didn't stop him. I was too obsessed with my own problems to help him with his.

When I wasn't hanging out with my friend and his wife, I was on the phone with my girlfriend. Dad would not be amused when the first phone bill arrived.

I got the job. It was selling $1300 vacuum cleaners to the unsuspecting public. Maybe I wasn't the worst salesman they ever had, but I couldn't have been far off. I never came close to making a sale.

But I still remember those nights out in the car, driving around town and listening to the acoustic guitar, dissonant leads, textured violin. The grating squawk of David Lowery accompanied me as I drove from pointless sale to pointless sale, obsessing about my woeful state, wanting nothing more than to be somewhere else.

There is nothing in this world more bitter than love
In all those long days of June
Bring me the long, brown grass now that it's dry
There is nothing in this world more bitter than Spring

What

Not exactly sure of what this will become.

I recently have felt the impulse to write. I'm not completely sure why, though I can surmise a few reasons why this would happen.

Firstly, I just turned 36. Among other things, this indicates that I have been an "adult" for 15 years, that I'm closer to 40 than I am to 30, and that presumably I should have some kind of life experience to share. I'm not sure any of this is the reason, though doubtless they do contribute.

Secondly, somebody from my High School graduating class recently started a blog. As a result, I've actually come into contact with some old friends. These are the guys who knew me in my most awkward, geekiest days. It's impossible for me to be reintroduced to somebody from my past without stirring up some of the emotions and experiences tied with that past.

So all this has got me thinking. Scary stuff. Scarier still because that thinking has caused me to want to write. I thought I had lost my literary-geekiness when I became a computer geek, but I was wrong.

So why blog? I don't know. It just seems easier. I do know that my impulse has been to write rather than to be read. That said, nobody writes just for himself. I realize the ego involved in publishing your thoughts to the intartubes.

I don't intend for this to be an emo-tastic "woe is me" diary, though I am sure some of my waxing-nostalgic will come across that way.

I have an idea for the format of this blog, upon which I will expound at a later date...for now, my job calls...